When an Oklahoma farmer saw his phone disappear in a pit filled with 280,000 pounds of grain, he figured it was pretty much gone. The iPhone had fallen from his shirt pocket and gone up a grain elevator, and went on its merry way into the void. Or so he thought — until he got a call nine months later from a stranger in Japan.

After his phone took that journey to the great grain pit where he was working, it traveled to another grain facility in Oklahoma, reports NBC News. From there it made its way along the Arkansas River, down the Mississippi River and onto a barge headed to Louisiana. It then boarded a ship — with the grain, obviously — and landed in Kashima, Japan.

Sitting in its bed of 2 million bushels of grain sorghum, our brave phone hero probably thought it would never find its way home again. It didn’t have any talking animals to assist it on a homeward bound journey, after all.

But a few days ago, the farmer got a call from Japan, asking if the caller had the right guy.

“I said, ‘Yeah, this is Kevin.’ He said, ‘Did you lose your cell phone?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I lost my cell phone last fall,’” the farmer explained.

Turns out a worker at the mill in Japan had come across the phone, which clearly didn’t belong, and mailed it back to Louisiana. Workers there then sent it along to the farmer in Oklahoma.

“It’s crazy, I can’t believe it. What really shocked me about it all was when I first got the phone call was what a small world it is. There are a lot of meaningful pictures on it, so we were real glad to get the phone back,” he said.

Oklahoma farmer receives lost iPhone from Japan 9 months later [NBC News]

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